Ohio State men's basketball | Aaron Craft: 'On a whole 'nother level'

Neal C. Lauron | Dispatch photoCraft steals the ball from Cincinnati Bearcats guard Jaquon Parker in 2012. He is OSU's career leader in steals and assists.

Nati Harnik | AP phiotoCraft makes another steal aginst Nebraska's Deverell Biggs. More important to Craft than numbers are the assists he has been able to make off the court by taking advantage of the opportunity provided to him as an Ohio State athlete.

Jason DeCrow | AP photoNotre Dame's Jerian Grant tries to pass away from intense defensive pressure applied by Craft. Craft was the Big Ten’s defensive player of the year as a sophomore, and an All-Big Ten first-teamer as a junior.

Gerry Broome | AP photoCraft tried to find a way around Duke's Mason Plumlee. Craft stands just under 6 feet 2 and wasn’t a much-sought prospect out of tiny Liberty-Benton High School.

Gerry Broome | AP photoDuke fans try to intimidate Craft as he waits to put the ball into play. Craft received the Preston V. McMurry Scholar Athlete Citizenship Award from Ohio State in October.

Eric Albrecht | Dispatch photoCraft fights for possession against the Illinois Fighting Illini. Craft has a 3.93 cumulative grade-point average in a pre-med curriculum.

Barbara J. Perenic | Dispatch photoCraft and Ohio Bobcats guard Nick Kellogg chase a loose ball. The only other Ohio State basketball player who might come close to Craft’s mass appeal during her four years on campus is Katie Smith.

“He had a tough introduction to this world, and he’s had certain struggles,” Hope Weyant said. “Whatever he does, he has to work extra hard. When he sees Aaron Craft always giving 110 percent, I think that resonates with him.”

It has resonated with a lot of people in the past four years.

Craft plays his final home game for the Buckeyes on Sunday. He and fellow senior Lenzelle Smith Jr. will be recognized before the game against Michigan State in Value City Arena. It will be a moment to capture for posterity.

In the long history of Ohio State basketball, there have been few like Craft. He shares the Big Ten record for career steals. He holds the school career record for assists. He is the first player in the history of the program to be named a first-team Academic All-American three times.

He has done as much community service — visiting hospital patients, speaking to schoolchildren, even taking a mission trip to Haiti — as his schedule has allowed.

All of it has resonated.

“It’s a really unique dynamic,” said Clark Kellogg, the Big Ten’s most valuable player at Ohio State in 1982. “He’ll go down as one of the most-popular and accomplished student-athletes in the history of the program.”

Another former player, Mel Nowell, said he has not seen another player since he wore the uniform more than 50 years ago “who has gathered the amount of admiration that this young man has at our university.”

Nowell, an East High School graduate, was a member of what is still the most-revered class of Ohio State basketball players in history. He started with Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek on teams that won the NCAA tournament in 1960 and reached the title game again in ’61 and ’62.

The only player who would rival Craft’s mass appeal was Havlicek, Nowell said, and for the same reason: their mentality.

“He hardly ever gave up on a play,” Nowell said. “Not that others gave up, but John went that extra mile, just as you see Craft do.

“He’s relentless. The kid can be tired, you know he’s tired, and he still will find something inside himself that will give you an effort that is extremely difficult to give. That reminds me of John.”

Craft and Havlicek have not met — “That’s on my bucket list,” Craft said — but they made similar first impressions at Ohio State.

Havlicek did not start his first game but started every one after that.

“Our recruiting class all averaged about 30 points a game in high school, and I knew we weren’t going to get 150 points a game,” Havlicek said, “so I figured I would do something a little different that would allow me to get more time on the starting five.”

Craft came off the bench in all but one game as a freshman, but his defensive chops got him on the court for an average of nearly 30 minutes per game for a 2010-11 team that ended the regular reason ranked No. 1 nationally and finished 34-3. He was voted the Big Ten’s sixth man of the year.

“I have watched him on TV,” Havlicek said, “and he certainly gives a lot of energy to the team. When you have a player like that, it sort of rubs off on the other players to want to play harder because you don’t want to feel like you’re the weak link out there.”

Craft’s appeal, though, goes beyond his floor burns and the sweat dripping from his chin. The same was true of Havlicek, whom former Columbus newspaper columnist Kaye Kessler described as a “fresh-faced, Tom-Sawyer-sort-of kid from down on the (Ohio) river.” Havlicek grew up in Bridgeport, Ohio.

Craft, from Findlay, Ohio, stands just under 6 foot 2 and wasn’t a much-sought prospect out of tiny Liberty-Benton High School. “I can put on a pair of jeans and a non-Ohio State T-shirt and look pretty normal,” he said.

But he can’t hide. Not after four years of his rosy cheeks and head-first leaps over courtside seats being broadcast nationwide.

One of Craft’s former roommates told ESPN.com that a team of seventh-grade girls volleyball players who were on campus last summer ran down Craft from four blocks away so they could get pictures and autographs.

“A couple years ago,” Ohio State coach Thad Matta said, “they were having freshman orientation downtown, 8,000 freshmen in Nationwide Arena, and they asked Aaron and I to come down and say a couple words. They introduced me, and it was like two claps. They introduced him, and the place erupted. I remember looking at him and saying, ‘Maybe they got our names confused?’ ”

Last month, a 70-something woman who has attended Ohio State games for 30 years asked to come to practice so she could meet Craft before he graduates in May.

After Craft got engaged last year — he will marry his high-school sweetheart in August — assistant coach Jeff Boals told some Rotarians that Craft “broke the hearts of every 8- to 68-year-old in the country.”

Weyant’s was the third Make-A-Wish request for Craft this season. Last fall, he videotaped a speech for an Ohio high-school leadership conference because a lab class prevented him from attending. He had missed a lab once and gotten a B-plus in the course and wasn’t going to risk that again. Craft has a 3.93 cumulative grade-point average in a pre-med curriculum.

“We can’t physically do all the things that people request, so we try to manage those by what we deem the most important, the most beneficial,” said Dave Egelhoff, who screens requests for Craft’s time as the Buckeyes’ director of basketball operations. “It’s tough on him because he knows he can make a difference, but it’s just physically impossible to do them all.”

Craft-worship is not universal, of course. He has his detractors, especially this season, with the Buckeyes having lost nearly as many Big Ten games as they’ve won and Craft sometimes prone to costly late-game turnovers because he is trying too hard to make a difference for a team that lacks a clutch scorer.

And as the menace on defense he has been for four years, opposing fans hate him. Iowa students booed and jeered him every time he touched the ball on Feb. 4. He never acknowledges such noise during or after a game because he doesn’t want any opponent to know that they entered his head. That night, he let his 17 points, six assists and six steals do his talking in Ohio State’s upset win.

Egelhoff said that when 7-foot Greg Oden, the future No. 1 NBA draft pick, played at Ohio State during the 2006-07 season, he was the eighth wonder of the world wherever the Buckeyes went on the road. “Everyone wanted to see him, talk to him,” Egelhoff said.

“With Aaron, they just want him to graduate and be done.”

At home, though, Craft’s supporters make up a decided majority. The only other Ohio State basketball player who might have come close to Craft’s mass appeal in a four-year career on campus might have been Katie Smith, another small-town (Logan, Ohio) product who went on to become one of the greatest players in WNBA history.

But “Aaron’s on a whole ’nother level,” Smith said with a laugh. “Nobody chased after me on campus.”

It’s possible that, in the past 50 years, maybe only a handful of Ohio State football players have been bigger men on campus than Craft, none more so than two-time Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin.

“Archie’s like the flag at Ohio State,” joked former basketball standout Bill Hosket.

But if that’s the case, Kellogg added, “Aaron’s one of the stars on the flag.”